Languaging AI: The Making of Behavioral Media
Meta.Morf 2024 Conference
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, LLM, GPT-4, Computation, Behavioral Media, Meta.Morf

Languaging AI: The Making of Behavioral Media" explores the profound transformation driven by the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are reshaping how we interact with AI and how AI interacts with us. This concept, termed 'Languaging AI,' highlights the mutual and reciprocal relationships between humans and AI, marking a paradigm shift where natural language is no longer exclusive to humans but shared with machines. This study introduces Behavioral Media (BM), a new media paradigm characterized by dynamic, two-way interactions between AI agents and users. This new generation of media is an evolutionary leap beyond the confines of traditional input-output mechanisms. These advanced models emerge as agents with a degree of autonomy, not merely facilitating but actively engaging with, contributing to, and shaping our dialogues, narratives, and artistic expressions.

Into the AI Vortex: The Production of Cultural Derivative Goo
Sar Conference 2023
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Diffusion Models, Computation, Art Theory, SAR Conference 2023

In his 1986 book The Engines of Creation, the nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler provoked with a thought experiment: if self-replicating technology exponentially grows, it will eventually leave its total environment of resources, required for production, as one large “gray goo.” Hence, coined as the Gray Goo scenario. This presentation argues that the field of AI cultural production, or AI Art, might approach a similar scenario. In the sense that, large scale AI models — DALLE-2, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and so on — trained on gigantic datasets (e.g., 5.85 billion image-text pairs) produce a large combinatorial space; and, conversely, that aesthetic differentiation becomes difficult when the complex mixing of styles and content lead to derivative “goo” with saturated similarity.

THE AUTOMATON AND THE SILICON CAVE II: Engineering Presence
Kunstakedemiet Trondheim
Keywords: Artificial General Intelligence, Education, Computation, Art Theory, Synthetic Phenomenology, Transcendental Computationalism

The title above imaginatively projects the mis-en-scène of a Platonic blockbuster: a parable of a science-fictional character stuck between the illusions of the senses and the idealities of the mind. To a certain extent this is the case, but only to provoke a philosophical backtracking of our present digital computational paradigm. The title sets a narrative of computation departing into two directions: in the first the automaton descends deeper into the cave as preconceptual and pre-apperceptive intelligence, to the obscurity of the causal-mechanistic fabric that constitutes a perceptible world. And second, the automaton ascends outside the cave, to the -possibly even more obscure- logical-inferential space of thought.

POST-SUBLIME: New Sensibilities for the Formless
Kunstakedemiet Trondheim
Keywords: Education, Computation, Art Theory, Synthetic Phenomenology, The Incomputable, Sublime, GAN's, Neural Networks, Functional Imagination, Latent Space Aesthetics

In its convoluted history the sublime has endured disputable interpretations and appearances, but its general agreement converges to some-Thing that cannot be presented? An adequate response to this creative predicament emerges from the words of Lyotard: when there is something that is not presentable, you have to make presentation suffer. In this module we contort the concept of the sublime, to ponder upon the question: how do we render that which is unpresentable and unrepresentable, sensible? We will confront Kant’s statement that the sublime experience cannot precipitate by something that is man-made, and argue to the contrary that in our technological age, the synthesis of nature and technology has created a new aesthetic tradition of the post-sublime. Post- not in the sense something ceases to exist, but as in the words of Ulrich Beck “as a marker of our helplessness, the intellectual equivalent of a blind man’s stick probing in the dark”. Parallel to the reading and discussion of the texts we will look at examples from films, games and algorithms to illuminate the hypothesis. >> read further

ALGORITHMIC BEHAVIOUR UNDER THE SPELL OF SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM (Episode 1)
Meta.Morf 2020 Catalalogue
Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, Critical Theory, Algorithms

The difference between the ‘old days’ of media cultivation by television and the omni-presence of social media, is that “television was crafted as a machinery of regulation, subjection, and supervision by its "destructive capture of attention and desire”. What we see now are blatant coercions that exert extreme behavioural manipulations on its users. It is as Deleuze anticipates, that ‘control societies’ are hyper-industrialised societies and would give birth to an ‘art of control’. This form of holistic social engineering can only lead to a totalitarian system of traits we already see rising above the horizon. We should ask ourselves, if the printing press propelled the Reformation, the radio Fascist ideologies and television American Imperialism, what kind of regime will emerge from this generation of (badly designed) technologies? >> read further